MISERY

Coup de pouce pour vous aider à bien comprendre le début de l'histoireLe romancier Paul Sheldon vient de mettre la dernière main à son nouveau roman, celui qui va le lancer dans la vraie littérature, loin de sa série de bestsellers à l'eau de rose et de leur lady de pacotille, Misery Chastain. Deux bouteilles de Champagne et un accident de voiture plus tard, il reprend connaissance. Une femme lui fait du bouche-à-bouche pour le sauver d'une insuffisance respiratoire. C'est l'hiver, à Sidewinder, dans le Colorado.*1umber whunnnnyerrrnnn umber whunnnnfayunnnnThese sounds: even in the haze.2But sometimes the sounds - like the pain - faded, and then there was only the haze. He remembered darkness: solid darkness had come before the haze. Did that mean he was making progress? Let there be light (even of the hazy variety), and the light was good, and so on and so on? Had those sounds existed in the darkness? He didn't know the answers to any of these questions. Did it make sense to ask them? He didn't know the answer to that one, either.The pain was somewhere below the sounds. The pain was east of the sun and south of his ears. That was ail he did know.For some length of time that seemed very long (and so was, since the pain and the stormy haze were the only two things which existed) those sounds were he only outer reality. He had no idea who he was or where he was and cared to know neither. He wished he was dead, but through the pain-soaked haze that filled his mind like a summer storm-cloud, he did not know he wished it.As time passed, he became aware that there were Periods of nonpain, and that these had a cyclic quality. And for the first time since emerging from the total blackness which had prologued the haze, he a thought which existed apart from whatever his Current situation was. This thought was of a broken-Piling which had jutted from the sand at Revere Beach. His mother and father had taken him to Revere Beach often when he was a kid, and he had (...)